Every year, millions of students open an exam without ever wondering how it gets there. That journey is longer and stranger than most imagine: locked rooms, sealed envelopes, iron chests, police escorts, and a lottery held less than an hour before the exam. Following recent errors in the HSC Physics exam questions, which have put the system under scrutiny, here’s how the process actually works, based on testimonies from the education board’s exam administrators.
Step 1: Four Teachers, Four Secret Drafts
The process begins at least a year before the exam. Each education board maintains a list of experienced teachers, specially trained in question writing. For each subject, four teachers from this list are asked to prepare four separate draft exams, without any of them knowing the content of the others.
The writing takes place in a designated room at the board’s headquarters, where the teachers have no contact with the outside world. Mobile phones, cameras, and any recording devices are prohibited. Once completed, each draft is sealed in an envelope and submitted to the board.
Step 2: Refinement Behind Closed Doors
Next, four different teachers review, correct, and refine the drafts. They may rewrite questions or even replace an exam with a completely new one. The isolation here is even stricter: according to the Jashore board’s exam officer, these teachers are not allowed to leave even for lunch; their meals are brought to them in the exam room. This is the stage designed to detect any errors.
Step 3: The First Lottery
Following the review process, each board prepares four sets of questions per subject, seals them, and sends them to the Inter-Agency Coordination Committee of Education Boards in Dhaka. There, in the presence of officials from all the boards, a draw is held to determine the sets. This year, although all nine general boards are using the same questionnaire for the first time, 36 sets were received, keeping the tradition alive.
Two of the selected sets are sent directly to the government printing press. Two are reserved, and these reserve questions are precisely the ones that will be used for the rescheduled exams for the Chittagong board.
Step 4: Iron Trunks and Police Escorts
Printing starts three to four months before the exam, since covering all boards can take up to two and a half months. Once printed, the sealed packets travel under law-enforcement escort to district treasuries, where they sit inside iron trunks. Days before the exam they move to upazila police stations, and on exam morning, police escort them to the centers.
Step 5: The 40-Minute Lottery
Here is the part few people know. The sealed packets cannot be opened at will. Only 40 to 50 minutes before the exam, the inter-board chairman in Dhaka draws a final lottery between the two printed sets. The chosen set’s code is flashed to board chairmen and district administrations, relayed to the centers — and only that one set is opened. The unused set returns to the board untouched.
So How Did the Physics Errors Happen?
According to authorities, most of the errors detected are printing mistakes, impossible to correct because no one proofreads the exams between printing and test day. However, the two errors in the first Physics exam were different: the ministry admitted they were in the questions themselves, which authorities characterized as negligence rather than a printing mistake. An inter-agency investigation traced the error to professors on one of the examining boards, who have been temporarily suspended, and the ministry confirmed that they will receive full marks for those questions during the assessment.
A system built on secrecy caught almost everything — except, this time, itself. Rising Barta will keep following how the boards tighten the net.
